Weep • • • Miriam Yarger

Weep

Miriam Yarger

Content Warning: drugs, sex, profanity, eating disorder, implied self harm

I saw the most innocent young women of my adolescence damaged at the hands of a patriarchal society, making denial confident,

starving to the point of helplessness revealing a skeleton of being hoping to purge the dissatisfaction,

teenage models hyper fixating on their tasteless supplements for sustained picture-ready bodies of consumption,

who plunged gangly fingers down juvenile throats to release a pressure on stomachs taut and constructed,

who threw undergarments off at the sight of men for a drop of validation withheld in the bank of steamroll millionaires of the fashion industry,

who taped and tucked and pulled and plucked to get fucked in alleys behind tattoo parlors by people of age to have raised them,

who woke up hours earlier each morning to paint away features in the mirror before marching onto a school bus reeking of hormones and rubber,

who bought fake IDs with privilege to poison each other with frat boys and brutally laced marijuana,

who devoured magazines Instagram posts status updates tweets followers likes standards just to end up counting calories,

who wound up in a stranger’s Toyota Camry at midnight on a Wednesday with a dying iPhone and Trojan wrappers shoved in a bedazzled clutch,

who stuffed bras with single ply toilet paper in high school gymnasium bathrooms for the eyes of anyone but themselves,

who avoided mirrors at the cost of losing identity in a reflection loathed and spiraled about uncontrollably,

who hid razor blades beneath jizzed on mattresses to trace blue veins of white fair skin once the crying moon was their only company,

until giving up in a heap of dejection manufactured, probed for years and topped only by a desire for ceasing to exist in a world in which at age fifteen were already deemed never good enough.